Sara Lautman has a hard time turning off her inner editor, except when it comes to drawing. So she admits that it came as a relief when she turned from her college obsession with short story writing toward art-making.

"I was really stubborn about writing being a big part of my professional life when I was grown-up," says Lautman, 29, today from Baltimore where she's working on a master of fine arts in illustration practice at Maryland Institute College of Art after living for the past few years in Oakland. "I wanted it very much, and then when I graduated from college, I didn't write at all.

"I couldn't think of anything to write about - it was depressing. Then drawing let me back in and let me make work that didn't have such high stakes because I wasn't supposed to be good at drawing, and I could mess up, and it was enjoyable. Then I started captioning the drawings, and I started having more fun writing again."

Since those blocked days, the cartoonist and illustrator's work has appeared in "Bitch," the Hairpin, the Rumpus, "Heeb," "The Stranger," and Huffington Post Arts and is slated to appear in the first Comic and Cartoon Art Annual. She'll share some of her experiences and artwork July 19 as part of the Cartoon Art Museum's Cartoonist-in-Residence program. "I'm still semi-new to being a professional cartoonist, so I'm looking at this as leverage," she says bluntly of the event. "It'll be fun and will give me some experience presenting work in a public venue instead of publishing it and then disappearing back into my house."

Lautman's work, much of it online, includes the surreal, self-published "Macrogroan" zine series - number six comes out at the end of the summer - as well as a comic column for the Hairpin, covering topics such as Birkenstock styles, guitar lessons, and a where-are-they-now fantasy concerning Palo Alto-bred all-girl band the Donnas. Lautman's pointed take on pop culture subjects such as Karen Carpenter is thrown in sharp contrast by her loose, playful hand - more Jules Feiffer and Lynn Johnston, two of Lautman's inspirations, than Charles Schulz or Cathy Guisewite. Single-panel gags like her image of a hummingbird "giving the finger a million times in one second" work the funny bone on several levels, though more autobiographical panels like "A Brief History of Getting Yelled At" go deeper and disarm with their honesty.

Life in Oakland, immersed in the local queer punk scene, helped ease that "editorial filter," says the sometime musician, mainly because "I was mostly unemployed, so I had lots of time to draw."